Blood banking for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

The number of umbilical cord cell transplants is increasing worldwide. The results are comparable to allogeneic bone marrow transplantation in a large variety of hematological diseases that are curable by bone marrow transplantation and, so far, the incidence of graft-versus-host disease has been limited. The advantages of using cord blood are related to the high number of hematopoietic progenitors present in the circulation at birth and to the relative immune immaturity of the newborn. A project is described to establish a European cord blood bank in order to obtain related or unrelated, matched or mismatched hematopoietic stem cells for transplantation to patients without a bone marrow donor.